Post Letture per la domenica

Letture per la domenica Intervistare i dittatori. La Columbia Journalism Review si chiede, in questo lunghissimo articolo che è anche una sorta di testamento al metodo americano, molto procedurale, con cui lavora la stampa di quel Paese e che fa da standard per il resto del mondo libero, se intervistare i dittatori sia eticamente corretto, visto soprattutto i limiti che vengono solitamente messi a queste interviste (cosa chiedere e cosa no, i vincoli della libertà di riportare eccetera). Money quote: "Perhaps the greatest chronicler of dictators and autocrats is Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker. Over three decades, he has interviewed everyone from Augusto Pinochet to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hugo Chávez, whom he profiled twice. When I reached Anderson, he told me that when dictators grant an interview they are often thinking strategically. But they are also motivated by hubris, vanity, and a belief in their own persuasive powers. Anderson feeds their egos. Before sitting down for an interview, he typically spends weeks learning everything he can about an autocrat, visiting their hometown, talking to people with whom they grew up, understanding their beliefs and motivations. “I’m genuinely interested in knowing what they have to say,” Anderson told me. “I suspend a visible judgment or judgmentalism about whatever they’ve done while I’m with them, and that may put them at ease.” Pinochet agreed to an interview with Anderson at the urging of his daughter Lucía; at the time, she was seeking to soften his image while he was facing a possible indictment for human rights violations. Pinochet joked with Anderson that, as a student of history, he understood that “dictators never end up well.” Only days after the piece ran, on October 12, 1998, Pinochet was arrested on charges of genocide and terrorism." https://www.cjr.org/feature/should-journalists-interview-dictators-dan-rather-jon-lee-anderson-christiane-amanpour.php